TTC – How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making [24 MP4, 1 PDF]|7.13 GB

Taught by Professor Ryan Hamilton, Associate Professor of Marketing at Emory University’sGoizueta Business School

Have you ever wondered why your neighbors painted their front door lime green? Or wished youcould watch TV without reaching for those snacks over and over again? Have you ever walked up anddown the toy aisles to find a birthday present and left without buying anything, just to stop atthe convenience store on the way home and buy the only toy on the shelf?

Those three activities—choosing a paint color, changing a habit, and purchasing a gift—mightseem unrelated at first glance. But all are examples of the fascinating process of human decisionmaking. Thousands of times each day, even tens of thousands by some estimates, we are presentedwith choices that require a decision. From the mundane to the life-changing, our brains areconstantly working to solve these decision puzzles.

How in the world do we do it?

Over millennia, philosophers, theologians, and mathematicians have all weighed in on the topic,and in recent centuries, economists, psychologists, and sociologists have joined theinvestigation. People have always been fascinated by how the mind works. We also have a desire tolearn from our mistakes, but in order to do so, it’s important to understand how we came to thedecision that led to those mistakes.

From the Trojans’ acceptance of that big wooden horse, to the factors that help us decide whomto trust and whom to disbelieve, to the food you are likely to purchase in the markettomorrow—someone somewhere has put forth a theory to explain the decision. Some of these pasttheories could most politely be described as “aspirational,” describing decision making as itshould be, not as it often is. Others have caught on in the minds of the general public and evenbeen published in the popular press, only to be later disproven. But the information presented inthis course is different.

In How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making, Professor Ryan Hamilton, AssociateProfessor of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, uses research revealedvia the scientific method to understand and explain human decision making. While his easygoingmanner and anecdotes about surprising and bizarre choices will keep you enthralled, ProfessorHamilton also shares what decision science has revealed through empirically tested theories thatmake falsifiable predictions and lead to testable hypotheses.

Using the manufacturing process as a metaphor to present those truths, Professor Hamiltondescribes in 24 in-depth lectures:

the informational raw materials you use as inputs to the decision-making processhow your cognitive machinery prepares and assembles those raw materials into a decisionthe motivational control mechanisms that govern and tweak your cognitive machinery toproduce a decision.

Dr. Hamilton’s boundless sense of wonder and enthusiasm for the subject of human decisionmaking, solid foundation in the scientific method, and pervasive sense of humor are apparent inevery lecture. While most of us believe we make decisions by examining our options rationally andreaching a logical conclusion, Dr. Hamilton, a consumer psychologist, shares a much moreinteresting reality of fascinating experiments, often irrational choices, and sometimescounterintuitive results.

Based on the outcomes of his own published experiments and those of his colleagues, Dr. Hamiltonpresents information that allows you to better understand the choices you face every day, thetools you can use to make the best decisions for your personal goals, and how to most effectivelyinfluence the decisions of others. Whether your goal is to improve your personal life or to applydecision science to your business, you’ll find the up-to-date research results and practicaladvice you need in this course.

The Rut of Routines: Everyday Scenarios

Everyone has routines that are established over weeks, months, or even years. These routinesbecome such a part of your life that they can obscure the fact that you’re actually makingchoices throughout the routine. For example, you go to the store to buy a bag of your favoritecoffee. You’ve been drinking this coffee for so many years that you don’t even consider thepurchase a “decision.” But when you arrive, you find that the store manager has rearrangedthe shelves and added five new brands plus six new flavors of your favorite brand. You pick upeach new bag, read the label, and sniff the aroma. But you just can’t seem to decide what tobuy. What’s happening here?

In this course, you’ll learn:

how the number and placement of choices affect your decisions and can even keep you frommaking any decision at allhow the memory of a song or a joke can cause you to make specific choices months or yearslaterwhether or not subliminal messages can cause you to make decisions against your willhow the blood flow in your brain can be altered by advertising without any consciousthought on your parthow heuristics, while often helpful, can sometimes lead to stereotyping and other poordecisions.

You’ll also discover how you can affect your cognitive machinery and the decisions of others.For example, say that for years, you paid your children to do chores around the house. Over time,you watched them learn to make their beds, do their own laundry, mow the yard, and even do thedusting. But when you visited them in their first apartments, you were shocked to see that theywere filthy. How could they possibly have made a decision like that? What went “wrong?”You’ll investigate:

the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivationhow reason-based decision making that seems rational can lead us astraythe power of partitioning to affect your own decisions and others’how to most effectively break a bad habit or establish a good onewhy the commonly used list of pros and cons can actually be a poor decision tool.

Professor BioProfessor Ryan Hamilton is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Emory University’s GoizuetaBusiness School, where he has taught since 2008. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing fromNorthwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

In 2013, he was recognized by the Marketing Science Institute as one of the most productive youngscholars in his field. Professor Hamilton also has received multiple teaching excellence awardsfrom his M.B.A. students at Emory and, in 2011, was named one of “The World’s Best 40B-School Profs under the Age of 40” by Poets & Quants, an online magazine covering theworld of M.B.A. education.

Professor Hamilton is a consumer psychologist whose research investigates shopper decisionmaking: how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence decision making at the point ofpurchase. His research findings have been published in prestigious peer-reviewed marketing andmanagement journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of MarketingResearch, the Journal of Marketing, Management Science, and Organizational Behavior and HumanDecision Processes. His findings also have been covered by The New York Times, The Wall StreetJournal, USA Today, The Financial Times, CNN Headline News and more.